Contributed Software. Recently, the Contributed Software Task Force produced a report recommending approaches to improving the VIVO community's ability to make, distribute and use "contributed" software – software that augments VIVO in some way, but is not part of the VIVO core software distribution. Reports, visualizations, ingest software, open social gadgets and other software should be easier for us all to use. The report makes three overarching recommendations:
- Develop concrete, visible guidelines through identifying gaps in community processes to assist VIVO contributors (current and potential) with organizing and sustaining work.
- Update and promote the current catalog of contributed applications and tools
- Create a “VIVO labs” organization to facilitate co-development of new projects
The Steering Group has endorsed this report fully. Over the coming months, you will see the recommendations of the task force being implemented. The current catalog of contributed applications and tools can be found in the wiki here. The authors of the report will be on an upcoming Implementation and Development call discussing the report and answering questions you may have.
Revised Authorship Diagram. In our efforts to continuously improve the wiki (and thanks to all who are commenting, revising, editing), this week, the authorship relationship diagram was revised. Several minor points were clarified, the dateTimeValue for publications was elaborated, and the presence of a vcard on a publication for the purpose of representing URL(s) – full text, alt-metrics, others – was added. Thanks to Jon Corson-Rikert for revising the diagram. These diagrams are created using an interesting piece of open source software "VUE" – Visual Understanding EnvironentEnvironment, and available for download from Tufts University at http://vue.tufts.edu/. VUE is a very handy tool for drawing ontological reltionship diagrams – most of the VIVO ontology diagrams are drawn using VUE.
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